Science is no savior
says Calvin professor David Van Baak. And the physicist is planning
to take that message to audiences across North American and beyond during
the 2001-2002 school year.

Van Baak is this
year's Calvin Lecturer, a post that is co-sponsored by Calvin and the
Christian Reformed Church's Campus
Ministries effort. As the Calvin Lecturer, Van Baak will visit four
to six North American campuses (with at least one in Canada) that have
a CRC Campus Minister.

There he will deliver
one public lecture with broad appeal, meet with smaller groups of students
and faculty and lead a seminar for Campus Ministry staff. And during
Interim (in January) Van Baak will speak at L'Abri Fellowship in Switzerland
and at various European universities in cooperation with the International
Fellowship of Evangelical Students.

The message that
Van Baak will deliver will vary some depending on the audience, but its
basic theme will remain the same: we err as a society when we look to
science for the answers to life's important questions. It's a theme
Van Baak says needs to be sounded.

"Science cannot
answer questions of value," he says, "yet those tend to be
society's most significant questions. And we have too often tried to
make science answer those questions. Science has a higher claim to authority
in our culture because of the advancements it has made possible. People
have been willing to treat science as the answer to all of life's questions.
I want to pull people back and get them thinking about the many questions
science cannot answer."

Van Baak, a Harvard-trained
physicist, has received grants from Research Corporation and the National
Science Foundation to work with students in diverse studies ranging
from spectroscopy of hydrogen atoms to tests of Newton's law of gravity.
In summers of 1993 and 1995 he hosted NSF-sponsored workshops for college
and university faculty from around the country on the use of state-of-the-art
diode lasers in undergraduate laboratories.

He spent 1993-94
on sabbatical at the National Institute for Science and Technology in
Boulder, Colorado, and spent 1998-99 on a Fulbright Fellowship at University
College Cork, a campus of the National University of Ireland in Cork,
Republic of Ireland. In other words he has the academic and scientific
credentials to be given an audience, something he thinks is critical
to his efforts.

"I have credibility
as a scientist," he says, "and I think that's important when
I visit other colleges and universities and begin to talk about what
science cannot do."

Indeed, Van Baak
hopes to use his credibility to grab people's attention. And then he
hopes to open their eyes to what he says is an injustice perpetrated
by science.

"Too often
scientists have asserted that science has all the answers," he
says. "And people who had questions that science couldn't answer
were simply told their questions weren't important. Science has had
an arrogance to it that has not served it well. What I claim is that
science doesn't need to be the source of all of the answers. I want
to enlarge people's view of what science can and cannot do."

The bespectacled
Van Baak says his identity as a Christian changes how he looks at his
identity as a scientist.

"Religious
belief," he says, "doesn't need scientific proof. Most people
are sympathetic to the claim that science is the only source of knowledge.
As a Christian I dispute that. I don't depend on science for justifying
my deepest convictions. For me religion is not a compartment of science.
To pretend that all questions have a scientific answer is to give away
the ballgame at the beginning."

Admitting that
science cannot answer all questions and solve all arguments was something
that Van Baak found "somewhat disillusioning" early in his
scientific career. But, now almost three decades into his work as a
physicist, he no longer feels that disappointment. Rather he remains
transfixed by the wonder of science that first captivated him as a Calvin
undergrad, what he calls science's "gee-whiz" factor, saying
that science is still "a wonderful window through which to see
amazing features of God's world." And he draws personal comfort
now that he has let go of the need for science to have more authority
than he believes it is capable of.

Those two messages
are what he hopes get heard during his year as Calvin Lecturer.

"I'm just
hoping to open people's eyes a little," he says. "I'd simply
like for people to consider that perhaps science doesn't have all the
answers, nor does it need to."